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Impression - Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment

Namco Bandai hopes to provide a faux-MMO experience on the Vita with this title, based on the popular novel and anime series, which is launching in North America today. Our reviewer is here to provide his early impressions of the title.

Comments

I guess this was made for the gazillion people who showed up in my MMORPG community when the Sword Art Online anime finished airing asking for "MMORPGs like Sword Art Online" (seriously, it was at least 200 people who just registered there to ask that question).

I've played some more over the last few days and the gameplay is holding up well. Boss fights are pretty fun and MMO-like (although maybe with less tactics than most actual MMOs but that's understandable with AIs). The controls work nicely (think that's what I said in the actual impression) - only "problem" is you can't really use items easily but I think that's deliberate and means you need to use skill healing or plan ahead instead - and fortunately the menus don't need using too much, though when you do they are a pain. Localisation is still stupid, one of the more hilarious and frustrating things I hadn't mentioned earlier is when it tries to refer to place names. I've seen locations translated in three different ways sometimes :)